Field
The invention relates to the field of autonomous lawn mowers.
Description of the Related Art
Autonomous lawn mowers are an increasing field. A few years ago autonomous lawn mowers have been presented and since then the capability of autonomous lawn mowers to detect obstacles and to fulfill their mowing task without interaction of a user have been improved. Of course the expectations of the customer also increased since then. Thus, autonomous lawn mowers with more sophisticated functions have been developed. But one problem is that the more sophisticated lawn mowers are quite expensive, because the included functionality necessarily needs higher effort in development and also production of such lawn mowers require more expensive parts. Thus, many potential customers will refrain from buying such sophisticated lawn mowers and rather buy a conventional lawn mower or at least a simpler autonomous lawn mower.
One example for such basic lawn mower is the self-propelled random motion lawn mower as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,570,227. This autonomous lawn mower needs a border wire for confining the mowing region and the lawn mower then randomly drives over the lawn until it reaches the border wire where its changes its direction. Since the only means for limiting the movement of the lawn mower is the border wire no intelligent functions can be implemented in such autonomous lawn mower and recognition of flat obstacles like cell phones lost on the lawn cannot be detected. In particular there is no possibility to upgrade from such basic autonomous lawn mower to a more intelligent or sophisticated system.
An example for a more sophisticated lawn mower is disclosed in EP 2 286 653 A2. This autonomous lawn mower is equipped with a camera and combines grass recognition with the output of a grass sensor. Due to capturing images of the environment more sophisticated or intelligent functions for controlling the autonomous lawn mower can be implemented. But the camera or the grass sensor are integrated in the autonomous lawn mower itself again and thus the customer has to decide before buying the lawn mower if he wants such functionality or whether he is satisfied with a cheaper one that then has no capability of upgrading the functionality of his mower.
Another possibility to provide an improved area detection in order to define non-grass regions that do not need to be mowed is described in DE 103 27 223 A1. The lawn mower described here comprises a camera and use of laser light to scan the ground but again these features are integrated in the lawn mower. Thus the lawn mower suffers the same problem as described above which means that an adaptation later on to new needs of the customer is not possible.
It is thus the object of the present invention to provide an autonomous lawn mower, a module for such autonomous lawn mower and a system consisting of the autonomous lawn mower and the module that enable a customer to decide later on whether a change of the module shall be performed so that additional features and functions can be added to the lawn mower by the new module. It is to be noted that in this respect even a part of a cover or housing of the mower is denoted as module. Module means any part that is intended to be replaced by another part, thereby making use of the same mechanical interface of the autonomous lawn mower.
The problem is solved by the autonomous lawn mower, the module for such autonomous lawn mower and the system comprising the autonomous lawn mower and the module as defined in the independent claims.
Advantageous features and aspects are defined in the dependent claims.